Information Retrieval

1. Information Retrieval CSE 8337 Spring 2003 Query Languages Material for these slides obtained from: Modern Information Retrieval by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hearst/irbook/ Prof. Raymond J. Mooney in CS378 at University of Texas Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval by Gerald Salton and Michael J. McGill, 1983, McGraw-Hill.

2. Query Languages TOC • Keyword Based • Boolean • Weighted Boolean • Context Based (Phrasal & Proximity) • Pattern Matching • Structural Queries

3. Keyword Based Queries • Basic Queries • Single word • Multiple words • Context Queries • Phrase • Proximity

4. Boolean Queries • Keywords combined with Boolean operators: • OR: (e1 OR e2) • AND: (e1 AND e2) • BUT: (e1 BUT e2) Satisfy e1 but note2 • Negation only allowed using BUT to allow efficient use of inverted index by filtering another efficiently retrievable set. • Naïve users have trouble with Boolean logic.

5. Boolean Retrieval with Inverted Indices • Primitive keyword: Retrieve containing documents using the inverted index. • OR: Recursively retrieve e1 and e2 and take union of results. • AND: Recursively retrieve e1 and e2 and take intersection of results. • BUT: Recursively retrieve e1 and e2 and take set difference of results.

6. Weighted Boolean Queries • Extension to boolean queries which adds weights to terms. • Weights indicate the degree of importance that that term has in the operation. • Traditional Boolean Interpretation:

7. Processing Weighted Boolean Queries • If both query and document terms are weighted, then retrieve a document if the document term weight is greater than the query term weight. • If documents are not weighted rank based on some similarity measure. • The weights in the query determines which (number) documents to be included. • The next few slides show how this can be done in a system with no document term weights.

8. Weighted Boolean Interpretation A0 A0.33 A0.5 A0.66 A1 • To perform Boolean operations, must be able to determine distance from items in A(B) to B(A). • Centroid based distances

9. A B Weighted OR • Aa OR Bb • As b gets closer to 1, include more items in B which are closest to A. • As a gets closer to 1, include more items in A which are closest to B. A OR B0.33 – All items in A plus 1/3 of those in B A0.66 OR B0.33 – 2/3 the items in A and 1/3 of those in B A B

10. A AND B0.33 – Remove all of B and 1/3 of A outside of intersection. A0.66 AND B0.33 – Remove 1/3 of A and 2/3 of B. A B A B Weighted AND • Aa AND Bb • As b gets closer to 1, items in A-B farthest from intersection are removed. • As a gets closer to 1, items in B-A farthest from intersection are removed.

11. Weighted NOT • Aa NOT Bb • As b gets closer to 1, remove more items from intersection that are farthest from A-B. • a indicates how much of A to include. A NOT B0.33 – All items in A-B and 2/3 of items in intersection. A0.66 NOT B0.33 – 2/3 the items in A-B and 2/3 of items in intersection. A B A B

12. Phrasal Queries • Retrieve documents with a specific phrase (ordered list of contiguous words) • “information theory” • May allow intervening stop words and/or stemming. • “buy camera” matches: “buy a camera” “buying the cameras” etc.

13. Phrasal Retrieval with Inverted Indices • Must have an inverted index that also stores positions of each keyword in a document. • Retrieve documents and positions for each individual word, intersect documents, and then finally check for ordered contiguity of keyword positions. • Best to start contiguity check with the least common word in the phrase.

14. Phrasal Search Algorithm • Find set of documents D in which all keywords (k1…km) in phrase occur (using AND query processing). • Intitialize empty set, R, of retrieved documents. • For each document, d, in D do • Get array, Pi , of positions of occurrences for each ki in d • Find shortest array Ps of the Pi’s • For each position p of keyword ks in Ps do • For each keyword ki except ks do • Use binary search to find a position (p – s + i ) in the array Pi • If correct position for every keyword found, add d to R • Return R

15. Proximity Queries • List of words with specific maximal distance constraints between terms. • Example: “dogs” and “race” within 4 words match “…dogs will begin the race…” • May also perform stemming and/or not count stop words.

16. Proximity Retrieval with Inverted Index • Use approach similar to phrasal search to find documents in which all keywords are found in a context that satisfies the proximity constraints. • During binary search for positions of remaining keywords, find closest position of kito p and check that it is within maximum allowed distance.

17. Pattern Matching • Allow queries that match strings rather than word tokens. • Requires more sophisticated data structures and algorithms than inverted indices to retrieve efficiently.

18. Simple Patterns • Prefixes: Pattern that matches start of word. • “anti” matches “antiquity”, “antibody”, etc. • Suffixes: Pattern that matches end of word: • “ix” matches “fix”, “matrix”, etc. • Substrings: Pattern that matches arbitrary subsequence of characters. • “rapt” matches “enrapture”, “velociraptor” etc. • Ranges: Pair of strings that matches any word lexicographically (alphabetically) between them. • “tin” to “tix” matches “tip”, “tire”, “title”, etc.

19. Allowing Errors • What if query or document contains typos or misspellings? • Judge similarity of words (or arbitrary strings) using: • Edit distance (cost of insert/delete/match) • Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) • Allow proximity search with bound on string similarity.

20. Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) • Length of the longest subsequence of characters shared by two strings. • A subsequence of a string is obtained by deleting zero or more characters. • Examples: • “misspell” to “mispell” is 7 • “misspelled” to “misinterpretted” is 7 “mis…p…e…ed”

21. Regular Expressions • Language for composing complex patterns from simpler ones. • An individual character is a regex. • Union: If e1 and e2 are regexes, then (e1 | e2) is a regex that matches whatever either e1 or e2 matches. • Concatenation: If e1 and e2 are regexes, then e1e2 is a regex that matches a string that consists of a substring that matches e1 immediately followed by a substring that matches e2 • Repetition: If e1 is a regex, then e1* is a regex that matches a sequence of zero or more strings that match e1

22. Regular Expression Examples • (u|e)nabl(e|ing) matches • unable • unabling • enable • enabling • (un|en)*able matches • able • unable • unenable • enununenable

23. Enhanced Regex’s (Perl) • Special terms for common sets of characters, such as alphabetic or numeric or general “wildcard”. • Special repetition operator (+) for 1 or more occurrences. • Special optional operator (?) for 0 or 1 occurrences. • Special repetition operator for specific range of number of occurrences: {min,max}. • A{1,5} One to five A’s. • A{5,} Five or more A’s • A{5} Exactly five A’s

24. Perl Regex’s • Character classes: • \w (word char) Any alpha-numeric (not: \W) • \d (digit char) Any digit (not: \D) • \s (space char) Any whitespace (not: \S) • . (wildcard) Anything • Anchor points: • \b (boundary) Word boundary • ^ Beginning of string • $ End of string

25. Perl Regex Examples • U.S. phone number with optional area code: • /\b(\(\d{3}\)\s?)?\d{3}-\d{4}\b/ • Email address: • /\b\S+@\S+(\.com|\.edu|\.gov|\.org|\.net)\b/ Note: Packages available to support Perl regex’s in Java

26. Structural Queries • Assumes documents have structure that can be exploited in search. • Structure could be: • Fixed set of fields, e.g. title, author, abstract, etc. • Hierarchical (recursive) tree structure: book chapter chapter title section title section title subsection

27. Queries with Structure • Allow queries for text appearing in specific fields: • “nuclear fusion” appearing in a chapter title • SFQL: Relational database query language SQL enhanced with “full text” search. Select abstract from journal.papers where author contains “Teller” and title contains “nuclear fusion” and date < 1/1/1950